Gridcoin requires a significant level of skill in order to begin "crunching". Despite this, Gridcoin's ability to monetise idle computing time towards "crunching" can modestly help with reducing
digital divide and incentivise the public to donate their CPU time towards scientific research.[10][7]
It was created on October 16, 2013, by Rob Halförd. Gridcoin, initially using the energy-intensive
proof of work - as used by
Bitcoin, before migrating to a
proof of stake protocol in 2014, similar to
Peercoin, in an attempt to address the environmental impact of cryptocurrency mining.[1][11][12]
An exploit was demonstrated in August 2017 that revealed the emails of Gridcoin users and allowed the theft of other users work. The research team disclosed the vulnerability to the developers in September 2016, and the patch for the vulnerability was released in March 2017 with version 3.5.8.7, however the implementation of the fix introduced other issues.[13]
The implementation Gridcoin-Research was created as a fork of Bitcoin and Peercoin and is licensed under the
MIT License.[3] It uses
Qt 5 for its user interface[14] and prebuilt
executables of the wallet are distributed for
Windows,
macOS, and
Debian.[2]
^"Network Blocks". Gridcoinstats.
Archived from the original on 14 June 2020. Retrieved 31 October 2020.
^Dong, Zhongli; Lee, Young Choon; Zomaya, Albert Y (2015). "Crowdware: A Framework for GPU-Based Public-Resource Computing with Energy-Aware Incentive Mechanism". 2015 IEEE 7th International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science (Cloud Com). p. 266.
doi:
10.1109/CloudCom.2015.73.
ISBN978-1-4673-9560-1.
S2CID6852894.
^Kent, Peter; Bain, Tyler (2019). Cryptocurrency Mining For Dummies. Wiley. p. 320.
ISBN9781119579472.
^
abElena Guerrero-Roldán, Ana; Baneres, David; Elena Rodriguez, M. (2020). Engineering data-driven adaptive trust-based e-assessment systems : challenges and infrastructure solutions. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing. p. 144.
ISBN9783030293260.